In the next decade, Year Zero will be how big data reaches everyone and will fundamentally change how we live.

Editor’s note: this post originally appeared on the author’s blog, Solve for Interesting. This lightly edited version is reprinted here with permission.

In 10 years, every human connected to the Internet will have a timeline. It will contain everything we’ve done since we started recording, and it will be the primary tool with which we administer our lives. This will fundamentally change how we live, love, work, and play. And we’ll look back at the time before our feed started — before Year Zero — as a huge, unknowable black hole.

This timeline — beginning for newborns at Year Zero — will be so intrinsic to life that it will quickly be taken for granted. Those without a timeline will be at a huge disadvantage. Those with a good one will have the tricks of a modern mentalist: perfect recall, suggestions for how to curry favor, ease maintaining friendships and influencing strangers, unthinkably higher Dunbar numbers — now, every interaction has a history.

This isn’t just about lifelogging health data, like your Fitbit or Jawbone. It isn’t about financial data, like Mint. It isn’t just your social graph or photo feed. It isn’t about commuting data like Waze or Maps. It’s about all of these, together, along with the tools and user interfaces and agents to make sense of it.

Every decade or so, something from military or enterprise technology finds its way, bent and twisted, into the mass market. The client-server computer gave us the PC; wide-area networks gave us the consumer web; pagers and cell phones gave us mobile devices. In the next decade, Year Zero will be how big data reaches everyone. Read more…

A framework for what separates those whose skills continue to build and those who stall out no matter how much they try.

We all know the Curse of Expertise — that thing that makes most experts awful at imagining what it’s like to be a novice. The Curse of Expertise makes tech editors weep and readers seethe. “Where’s the empathy?!” we say, as if the expert had a conscious choice. But they mostly don’t. The Curse of Expertise is not a problem for which MOAR EMPATHY is the solution. Experts don’t lack empathy; they lack the security clearance to the part of their brain where their cognitive biases live. Subconscious cognitive biases. And those biases don’t just make us (experts) fail at predicting the struggle of novices, they can also make us less likely to see novel solutions to well-worn problems.

But given a choice to suddenly be an expert or a novice, we’d pick Curse of the Sucks-To-Be-Me Expert over Curse of the I-Suck-At-This Novice. There’s a third curse, though. The mastery curve is, of course, not binary, but a continuum from first-time to Jiro-Dreams-Of-Sushi. And there in the middle? The Curse of the Intermediate. The Curse of the Intermediate is the worst because it’s the place where hopes and dreams of expertise go to die. The place where even the most patient practicer eventually believes they just don’t have what it takes. Read more…

Designing for the Internet of Things is requiring designers and engineers to expand the boundaries of their traditionally defined roles. In this Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Mary Treseler sat down with Martin Charlier, an independent design consultant and co-founder at Rain Cloud, to discuss the future of interfaces and the increasing need to merge industrial and interaction design in era of the Internet of Things.

Charlier stressed the importance of embracing the symbiotic nature of interaction design and service design:

“How I got into Internet of Things is interesting. My degree from Ravensbourne was in a very progressive design course that looked at product interaction and service design as one course. For us, it was pretty natural to think of product or services in a very open way. Whether they are connected or not connected didn’t really matter too much because it was basically understanding that technology is there to build almost anything. It’s really about how you design with that mind.

…

“When I was working in industrial design, it became really clear for me how important that is. Specifically, I remember one project working on a built-in oven … In this project, we specifically couldn’t change how you would interact with it. The user interface was already defined, and our task was to define how it looked. It became clear to me that I don’t want to exclude any one area, and it feels really unnatural to design a product but only worry about what it looks like and let somebody else worry about how it’s operated, or vice versa. Products in today’s world, especially, need to be thought about from all of these angles. You can’t really design a coffee maker anymore without thinking about the service that it might plug into or the systems that it connects to. You have to think about all of these things at the same time.”

In this week’s Radar Podcast episode, O’Reilly’s Roger Magoulas chatted with Tricia Wang, a global tech ethnographer and co-founder of PL Data, about how qualitative and quantitative data need to work together, reframing “data-driven decision making,” and building the ideal team.

Purpose-driven problem solving

Wang stressed that quantitative and qualitative need to work together. Rather than focusing on data-driven decision making, we need to focus on the best way to identify and solve the problem at hand: the data alone won’t provide the answers:

“It’s been kind of a detriment to our field that there’s this phrase ‘data-driven decision making.’ I think oftentimes people expect that the data’s going to give you answers. Data does not give you answers; it gives you inputs. You still have to figure out how to do the translation work and figure out what the data is trying to explain, right? I think data-driven decision making does not accurately describe what data can do. Really what we should be talking about is purpose-driven problem solving with data. Read more…

The real challenge going forward: we can't trust anything.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about postmodern computing, and characterized it as the computing in a world of distrust.

This morning, I read Steve Bellovin’s blog post, What Must We Trust? — Bellovin explains that “modern” (my word) security is founded on the idea of a “Trusted Computing Base” (TCB), defined (in part) in the United States’ Defense Department’s Orange Book. There were parts of a system that you had to trust, and you had to guard their integrity vigilantly: the kernel, certainly, but also specific configuration files, executables, and so on.

The TCB has always been problematic, particularly since (at least initially) it did not consider the problem of network connections. But networking aside, Bellovin argues that recent events have blown the idea of a “trusted” system to bits. We’ve seen attacks against (Bellovin’s list) batteries, webcams, USB, and more. If Andromedans (Bellovin doesn’t want to say NSA) have managed to infiltrate our disk drives, what can trust mean? And it would be naive to think that this stops with devices that have disk drives. Our devices, from Fitbits to data centers, have been pwnd even before they’re built. Read more…

Now that technology has made its way into the playroom, there are a lot of important questions we should be asking.

Playing is how we learn. Through play, we develop large and fine motor skills, refine language and social interaction, and discover important facts about everything from the cycle of life and death to the laws of physics. When we play, we test the world around us, and share and grow.

But play is changing because it’s now filled with technology. In the coming months, I’m going to be looking at how data and connectivity are changing toys and the very nature of play. I’ll be talking to designers, inventors, technologists, and educators, and publishing the results in a report for O’Reilly Media.

Here’s my thinking so far:

Until very recent times, play was a purely tangible, real-world experience. Almost every adult alive has built a tower of blocks, climbed something, chased another person, used a skipping rope, and put together a puzzle. We all know the rules of tag and hide and seek. Some of our fondest memories include creative and imaginative play. We were pirates. We were princesses. We were explorers in a new, exciting land, limited only by our own imaginations and the loving cry of parents calling us home for dinner. Read more…